By Jennifer McGillan

In 1957 H.J. Heinz and Co published 57 Prize Winning Recipes, a promotional single-product cookbook. As a historical document, it is a snapshot of the late 1950s American culinary landscape, offering insight into the ongoing evolution and diversification of the American palate in the mid-twentieth century. It also documents the tension generated as part of that diversification: throughout the cookbook recipes reflecting consumer familiarity and interest in dishes from culinary traditions that were previously “foreign,” such as Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food, are paired with illustrations that mock those same cultures and traditions. 

57 Prize Winning Recipes aimed to put ketchup at the forefront of the cooking and eating experience, inviting cooks to reconsider its applications in the kitchen, and asking prospective diners to consider the reality of ketchup – its taste and texture  – writ large. The primary purpose of the cookbook is to sell Heinz ketchup to the public. As such, the recipes presented in the cookbook are intended for home cooks. They reflect prevailing cultural norms and trends, offer cooks alternatives to familiar standards, and celebrate culinary innovation, though using a limited palette, and for a very specific palate. 

As a home cook with an interest in vintage food, reading this cookbook is a wild ride. The recipes themselves are both intriguing and repulsive and  the illustrations are simultaneously lurid, offensive, and quaint. Like many vintage cookbooks, it invites a number of questions including: Who made this cookbook? Why? Were they serious or was it just a publicity stunt? Are any of these recipes any good?

About the cookbook

57 Prize Winning Recipes is a slender volume of only 32 pages, printed in color on clay (magazine) paper, bound with staples. This paper, which fuses to itself when it gets wet, is the greatest material challenge of working with the cookbook, as I discovered while cooking with my personal copy. As I carefully pulled the pages apart and patted them dry, I started to wonder: was this cookbook created to be seen, read, and talked about, but never used? Or was the paper a mistake made by people who sold food but didn’t cook?

There is no surviving documentation on creation and development of the cookbook in the H.J. Heinz Company records, but based on newspaper accounts, the recipes are most likely the result of two contests: one held in 1955, in which contestants submitted their own recipes, and one held in 1956, in which contestants submitted names for recipes created by Heinz. Unlike other cookbooks resulting from recipe contests, such as the Pillsbury Bake-off, the winners’ names are not attached to the recipes. Finding the names and stories of the contest winners for 57 Recipes is also part of my research on the cookbook.

Visually and stylistically, the cookbook is an overwhelming mish-mash, in which whimsical line drawings done in primary colors illustrating recipes mix with full color photographs of dishes that verge on garish and nauseating. (Our cataloger mostly-jokingly threatened to go on strike after she cataloged the library’s copy.)

In addition to the illustrations of the recipes themselves, the art in the cookbook reflects a tension between a progressive, internationally-flavored future, and a conservative, xenophobic present, communicating complicated messages of  acceptance and mockery in the same space. For example, the first illustration in the cookbook is a drawing of a chef with a tomato face on a human body, wearing a monocle and carrying a magic wand, evoking a classy, transformative, future-positive vibe. 

Meanwhile, only a few pages later, the illustrations for the Mexican and Chinese dishes are accompanied by a shrimp in a sombrero playing the ukulele, a shrimp with a Mandarin hat and a Fu Manchu mustache, and eggs with slanted eyes wearing Asian conical hats. While these images communicated clear racial stereotypes, not all of the images included in the cookbook function in the same way. Some of the illustrations employ imagery that is evocative of a country or culture using different visual forms.  The illustration for Chicken Cacciatore, for example, (p. 9) is a chicken playing a guitar on a gondolier and Texas Hot Eggs are accompanied by an egg dressed like a cowboy and wielding a whip (p. 15). When  read alongside one another, the racist and xenophobic illustrations provided for the other recipes are thus even more stark and jarring

Alongside the drawings are photographs of the dishes in full, saturated color. They are so vivid you can almost taste the ketchup, and there is a lot of ketchup. They are the least appetizing part of the whole publication. As part of my research, I cooked and photographed (and also ate) some of the dishes, to show what they looked like in a real-life, non-promotional context. 

The proof is in the crabcake

Reading and cooking from vintage recipes can be much like reading ancient poems and legends: a voyage of hope and occasionally perilous textual uncertainty that sometimes sends in joy.

In the case of 57 Recipes,  the recipes are cookable, and in some cases, delicious. Crab Biscayne (p. 11), with some minor alterations,  is now a regular part of my Thanksgiving and Christmas menus. I tried making it with tomato sauce and it is actually better with ketchup. The Spicy Pear Compote was also really good.

 I was selective with the dishes I chose to prepare, in order to avoid gratuitously wasting food. I chose dishes that I thought I could share, or that were easily cut down for one person. As my research on the contest winners progressed, I also focused on cooking recipes created by identifiable individuals.

Cooking with ketchup was paradoxically freeing. I was not expecting the results to be good, so I didn’t put any expectations on myself or my cooking skills. Techniques I learned in the process include: how to use a double boiler and the broiler, and how to bake a cake from scratch. Some tastes and textures were odd, but there was only one dish – Eggs Ample – where the ketchup turned out to be Too Much. 

Some examples:

---

Jennifer McGillan has been the Coordinator  of Manuscripts at Mississippi State University since 2015. She holds a BA in English from Davidson College (1997), a MLIS-Archives from the University of Pittsburgh (2003) and a JD from New York Law School (2012). Her research interests include 19th century legal history and enslaved persons, vintage cooking and recipes, “women’s work,” the various intersections of archives work and disability, and pirates.

---

---